


kicking up dust

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Other: See Story Notes, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 02:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13940859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: “I think this might be hell,” Boyd said later, because the sheets itched and the bedspread itched and all the bourbon was cheap and Boyd expected that if Raylan had gone to heaven, well, Boyd never would have managed to pay the visitors’ fee.“On account of the sheets?” Raylan wondered, cocking his eyebrow and looking far too comfortable in the uncomfortable bed. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”





	kicking up dust

**Author's Note:**

> I requested drabble prompts on tumblr, and a lovely soul suggested: post-finale, Raylan is killed by Boon but doesn't know it. He is in some kind of purgatory where he is forced to face the unresolved issues of his past over and over again. Boyd - who is alive and in prison - is connected to Raylan (through dreams or whatever) and he's the only one who can set him free by helping him to resolve these issues. ... So, this is not a drabble, but it was fun to write!
> 
> Other warnings: infant death mentioned but not real, Boyd being violent (canon typical), some opiate use, figments of Raylan's imagination being unpleasant (also kind of canonical). Schmoop at the end! Clearly, major character death.
> 
> Title is from Gregory Alan Isakov's "Time Will Tell," which I had on repeat while writing this.

It’s the crying that wakes Raylan up. It ain’t Willa, of course. Willa never cries, not in this motel room where it’s always dark, where Raylan can never find the switch for the light, where the curtains over the window sear the skin of his palms every time he tries to open them for the light.

Sometimes Raylan wakes up to silence. Sometimes Willa’s fine, chewing on her fingers and staring up at Raylan with eyes that might have been blue, in the daytime, but are inky black in the dark, deep and solemn and brimming with disdain for the father that hid from her even before she was born. (Sometimes Raylan wakes up to silence, and Willa’s eyes aren’t the only part of her that’s blue. Those days, he wraps his hands around the curtains until the skin melts off his hands, until the suffocating silence is broken by his screams.)

It’s mostly Winona, that does the crying. Crying about Willa’s weak heart—got that from her daddy, no doubt, the man who couldn’t bring himself to be a father to baby girl—crying about Raylan’s job, crying about how Raylan never once loved her as much as he loves getting killed.

Tonight it’s Raylan’s mama doing the crying. Which ain’t quite right. Raylan learned a lot from Arlo (too much, folks said, when their good-for-nothing progeny came stumbling in with fat lips and coward’s tears), but it was Frances who taught him how to set his teeth, squint his eyes, and keep spitting even after you’d been brought low. It was Frances, who taught him to stand back up, who taught him that mountain blood never, _ever_ cries.

Frances cries about the kind of murderous man her son turned out to be, no better than any other Crowder or Givens for a hundred years, no better than the hills. She cries about what a shitty daddy he is. She cries about never having had the chance to meet Raylan’s bride, though the wedding was a good two months before she’d died.

 

At first, Raylan thinks he’s a hostage. Last thing he recalls is facing off against Boon, can still feel his chest ache from the little dick’s good aim, can’t recall whether he managed to wound the asshole in return. Would’ve been easy to snatch a wounded marshal off the road, maybe hide him up in the woods, give him time to go a little crazy.

It sounds like the kind of thing Boyd would do.

So Raylan goes a little crazy, in the room that looks like his motel room but ain’t, surrounded by crying women and a silent baby, with a curtain that can char the palms off your hands and a light that won’t turn on. Arlo kept talking to Helen, at the end, talked like she was standing in the same room and not buried in the yard, and everyone knows Raylan Givens is his daddy’s son.

He’s his daddy’s son, and so if Arlo’s madness called up Helen’s ghost, who could Raylan possibly conjure but a shade of the magnificent Boyd Crowder?

Boyd cries, too. Raylan hadn’t anticipated that. Boyd’s hands have blood dried in the nails. He reeks of gunpowder and dynamite, and his clothes have seen far better days.

Raylan wakes up and Boyd’s sitting at the table that ain’t Raylan’s motel table, the chair swung around to face Raylan’s bed, Boyd tilted forward with his elbows resting on his knees and his hands locked between them, as though if he keeps them clasped Raylan won’t be able to see them shake.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Raylan wonders, his voice hoarse. He ain’t had much cause to speak, since being caught. There’s no reasoning with figments of his own mind. Of course, there ain’t never been any reasoning with Boyd, but Raylan’s never been able to resist opening his mouth all the same.

“Raylan,” Boyd croaks, shaking, and doesn’t move to brush away the tears cutting through the soot on his hollowed cheeks.

“As I live and breathe,” Raylan declares archly, swinging out of bed. Boyd flinches; his mouth is still open around the last syllable of Raylan’s name, and he emits a noise that—if it came from anyone else—Raylan would have believed to be a sob.

Raylan hasn’t seen Boyd Crowder bawl since they were both six years old.

“You in need of a handkerchief or a shot of Jim Beam?” Raylan asks, making his way over to the counter that ain’t his. Raylan’s made his way through a bottle or two, since he’s been here, but every time he wakes the bar is full to brimming, just like it was the day or night before, well-stocked with cheap whiskey and all sorts of other things a man don’t need.

Unless that man is Boyd Crowder, apparently, crying a river in what ain’t Raylan’s chair.

Raylan goes to pour the whiskey, for himself if not Boyd, a toast to waking up to something other than Willa’s devastating silences or a woman’s tears. He reaches for the glass and gets bowled into from behind, spun around and slammed against the counter and he thinks Boyd must be going for his throat, the way he hadn’t at the cabin, reaches for his gun and remembers he don’t have it and is completely unprepared for Boyd to crack his nose against Raylan’s and shove past that to reach his lips.

Raylan Givens hasn’t kissed Boyd Crowder since 1990. At least, not while he’s awake, and ain’t no man responsible for the ghosts of kisses malingering in his dreams.

It ain’t as good as he remembers. His nose aches, for one, and Boyd tastes like he’s been living off rotgut and roadkill and ain’t brushed his teeth in a week, and he ain’t letting Raylan pull his head away to breathe. It ain’t as good as he remembers, but it’s still the best kiss to happen to Raylan in over twenty years.

Raylan expects Winona to show up in the corner then, crying or screeching or both, or maybe Aunt Helen, or Ava to say her piece and smoke a judgmental cigarette, but it’s quiet other than the sound of their kissing and the hurt sounds Boyd don’t seem to realize he’s still breathing into Raylan’s open mouth.

“You ain’t too bad at that,” Raylan confesses, once he’s wrenched his head away to catch his breath, wiping the saliva off his chin. “For a figment of my imagination.”

Boyd cocks his eyebrow. “I think you have mistaken our roles, Raylan,” he chides, running his hands over Raylan’s hips, up his chest, down his arms, like Raylan’s mama used to do, feeling for broken ribs or bones. “But as this is my dream, I would surmise that you’ll be every bit as ornery as you were in life.”

Both Raylan’s eyebrows creep up his forehead. “Pardon me?” he snaps. “First off, I ain’t talking about dreams, I’m talking about me going crazy from being locked up in this room. And second, the hell you mean _were_? You saying that in your dreams I’m _dead_? I knew you had aspirations, Boyd, I just never suspected that to truly be one of them.”

Boyd frowns. He doesn’t let go of Raylan’s belt loops though, which proves he ain’t really there—the real Boyd Crowder never kept his hands on Raylan once the fight was on. Stood too close, sure, talked too big and swung his arms wide and grinned like a donkey’s jawbone, but he never held on.

If he had … If he had held on, then Raylan would’ve stayed.

“ _First off_ ,” Boyd mimics, rolling out the words, “you sure do sound crazy, which must speak to my own state of mind in these dark days. And, though normally I wouldn’t presume to know for certain which of us is the dreamer and which of us the dreamed, I can say with great assurance, Raylan...” Boyd paused. Swallowed. Chewed on his cheeks, the way he had since his teeth first came in. There wasn’t a thing in the world Raylan didn’t know about Boyd Crowder, not a day of his life from zero to nineteen that Raylan had lost. “Raylan, you can’t be the dreamer, because there ain’t no dreaming once you’re dead.”

“I would say that’s a pretty impoverished view of the afterlife for a philosopher such as yourself, Boyd,” Raylan replied, before he’d quite gotten a handle on just what it was Boyd had meant. “And what the fuck? I ain’t dead. I’m just trapped in this goddamned room. I expect it ain’t so different from the jail cell you’re currently occupying.”

Boyd shook his head. Flattened his lips and ran his hands over Raylan’s ribs, over the unscarred spot on Raylan’s chest that still ached from Boon’s shot. Then he leaned in to kiss Raylan again, and Raylan let him, because – well, because Boyd was the only figment of Raylan’s imagination who had tried.

“You think I’d stay in prison?” Boyd retorted, scowling against Raylan’s lips. “You think I’d sit in a courtroom and smile at the judge knowing that there was a man running free who had _killed_ you? Raylan, darling, if I’m your dream, and I think you’re dead, then you tell me what I’d do.”

Raylan shrugged. Time was, the answer to that question was: “join the Army and get the hell outta Dodge,” he answered. “Though I wasn’t dead, then. Then I was just a nearly dead kid with a broken hand.”

“Don’t put that on me, Raylan,” Boyd demands, and this part at least ain’t so different from Raylan’s useless arguments with Winona and Frances and Helen and Ava about all the places Raylan Givens fell short, all the things he ought to have done and never did. “I joined the Army because you ran.”

“I ran because you let me,” Raylan whispered into Boyd’s mouth, bit into Boyd’s bottom lip to catch his flinch.

Then Raylan’s teeth clicked together right through Boyd’s lip. Boyd’s translucent lip, the rest of him fading and insubstantial under Raylan’s hands.

That was odd. That didn’t normally happen to Raylan’s shadows, not until he ignored them in favor of climbing under the itchy polyester bedspread and going back to sleep.

“Fuck!” Boyd hissed, reaching for Raylan’s belt loops and reaching through Raylan’s waist instead. “Fuck, I must be waking up, goddamnit!”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Raylan said agreeably, and there was only time to catch a glimpse of Boyd’s irked gaze before he was gone.

Raylan blinked, and Boyd’s face faded like the afterimage of a flash, blurry and already half gone. In his place there was Helen, sitting in Boyd’s chair, smoking a cigarette.

“You never did do right by that boy,” she said, each word a puff of smoke. “Never wrote any of us, did you, never called. Never even knew your mama was dying from the inside.”

“What did it matter?” Raylan wondered. He’d had this conversation with this Helen before. “She’d been dying on the outside since before I was even born.”

Helen kept talking, but Boyd was gone, and so Raylan climbed under the cheap sheets and went to sleep.

 

Boyd woke up cursing, screaming Raylan’s name into the dark. It didn’t make any difference, of course; Raylan had faded into the mists of Boyd’s dream.

_I dreamt a dream last night._

It had been Boyd’s favorite passage from _Romeo and Juliet_ , when they’d read it freshman year. He’d spun and danced around Raylan in the halls, waving the battered school copy of the play in Raylan’s face and declaiming Mercutio’s lines with dramatic gravitas that went unappreciated by Raylan and the hall monitor and the Vice Principal all. Raylan had signed Boyd up for the school play. The Vice Principal had signed him up for a month of Saturday detentions instead. Boyd had watched Raylan roll his eyes and mumble along, after the tenth declamation, and should have known then what it had taken him another five years to learn.

Raylan Givens was indispensable. Irreplaceable.

It was too bad that Boyd hadn’t learned that until after the mine caved in. Until Boyd had broken Raylan’s hand, holding on. Until Boyd had let go.

Boyd thought about the dream while he splashed water on his face, scrubbed himself awake and quickly washed in the cold water of the sink. Marshals and FBI and staties might be combing the hills, but Boyd knew the hills better than any of them. Better than any of them left alive.

He’d broken his thumb, getting out of the zip ties. It was Loretta McCready who’d radioed for help, Raylan down and Boon down and tears in her voice, just a little girl who’d seen her idol shot and couldn’t make him breathe. Boyd had made it out of the SUV before Lieutenant Gutterson even spun it around, didn’t stop for their cries or their guns.

Boon was already dead, by the time Boyd got there, shot by Loretta or by Raylan or by Ava still in her cuffs. If the road hadn’t been crawling with feds, Boyd would have put another forty rounds in the boy’s chest, for daring to tread where Boyd had placed a claim years, decades before.

If the road hadn’t been crawling with feds, Boyd would have laid himself across Raylan’s body and begged. He would have bargained with Death. He would have crawled through fire, holding tight onto Raylan’s broken hand.

Twenty years had taught Boyd to hang on, and Raylan had left him all the same.

_If love be rough with you, be rough with love._

Boon was dead, but no matter. Loretta was alive, and without Loretta, Boon wouldn’t have come. Ava was alive, and Ava had started the manhunt that had gotten Raylan Givens killed. Mullen and Gutterson and Brooks were alive, dared to keep breathing when Raylan was gone.

Boyd had plenty to do. He shook away the last of the dream, the feel of Raylan under his hands, the taste of Raylan on his tongue, the gentle mocking in Raylan’s voice, the reluctant smile Boyd would never coax out again, not in this life.

_I dreamt a dream last night._

_And so did I._

_Well, what was yours?_

_That dreamers often lie._

 

“Christ, I never thought I’d make it back here,” Boyd said, waking Raylan from his doze. Raylan never tired, in this place, but sleeping sent the shades away, so Raylan spent as much time in bed as he possibly could. Before Boyd it had been Art, not crying, thank the Lord, not even shouting, just _disappointed_ , sighing over Raylan and the stolen money, sighing over Raylan not being Chief Deputy material, sighing over Raylan being a shitty husband and a shittier daddy and never knowing what he wanted well enough to pursue it.

And that wasn’t quite the truth of it. Raylan had known what he wanted. He’d known where it was, even, and how to get it. It had taken him until nineteen, to realize that if he kept reaching for his heart’s desire, he’d wind up buried and bleeding and alone.

Boyd always let go, after all. If there was one thing Raylan had learned in nineteen long years of Harlan living, it was that Boyd always let go.

Raylan had spent too many years waiting for Boyd to turn up again. He didn’t care to be repeating old habits, only there wasn’t much else to do in this dark room but plug his ears, curl up in the scratchy sheets, and wait.

“You saying I ain’t worth dreaming about?” Raylan wondered idly, stretching and reaching for Boyd, who was already bending down over the bed. “And here I thought you and Queen Mab were old friends.”

“Shut up, Raylan,” Boyd said, dropped down over Raylan and kissed him, sweeter and softer than any of Raylan’s other ghosts, than Willa or Winona or Frances, Helen or Arlo or Art or Vasquez, even Gary or Tom when they came around.

“Shut me up, then,” Raylan retorted, pulling back to note the bags under Boyd’s bloodshot eyes, the shake in his fingers and the ribs prominent against Raylan’s hands. “Since you’re so determined to believe that I’m the one being dreamed.”

Boyd did his level best, and they passed the time that way for a fair while, the most substantial shade Raylan had seen in a score of days.

“Tell me about how I died,” Raylan demanded, after, Boyd panting and the motel sheets damp with come and sweat.

Boyd shivered. “Why the hell would you ask that, Raylan Givens?” he snapped. “Are you that damn determined to ruin the afterglow?”

Raylan shrugged. “I ain’t never tried to keep a figment of my imagination around,” he admitted. “I figure getting you to talk is the best way.”

“You figure riling me up is the best way,” Boyd corrected, digging his pointy chin into Raylan’s chest. “And I ain’t the figment here.”

“Wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Raylan disagreed. “If I was in your imagination, I expect I’d be a sight more tractable than I am. Now, go on, Boyd. Regale me.”

Boyd sighed theatrically. “I shouldn’t need to tell you shit, Raylan, as you are simply drawn out of my hippocampus, but since you’re begging to know –”

“Who said I was begging?” Raylan interjected, but Boyd spoke over him.

“Boon shot you. On the road. In a shootout, they say, when you were driving out of the mountains with Ava, him following with Loretta McCready in his truck.”

Raylan rolled his eyes. “Come on, Boyd. Least you could do is be original. I know very well that Boon shot me, but he obviously didn’t kill me, or I wouldn’t be stuck in this room, imagining all sorts of nefarious doings with you.”

“You call this nefarious?” Boyd raised his thick eyebrows, eyes like pitch in the dark room, grin as bright as it had been in the black of mines. He licked a stripe up Raylan’s neck, knowing too well just how to make Raylan shiver under his tongue. “You just wait and – _goddammit_.”

The feel of Boyd’s tongue vanished, left nothing but saliva and cool air behind, Boyd fading out of Raylan’s arms.

“ _Raylan_ ,” Boyd shouted, mouth open wide, the far wall visible through his stricken face, nothing but a whisper echoing from his scream.

Raylan didn’t cry. He set his jaw, and he squinted his eyes, and he turned away. He stayed down, though his mama had taught him better, stayed down and curled up tight and didn’t listen to her cry about knowing all along that Boyd Crowder would bring her son to a bloody end.

 

Boyd thought about the dream, as he burned Loretta McCready’s house and her store houses and her crops. He thought about Raylan saying he was trapped in that room as he sliced into Wynn Duffy, as he drove across the state line still covered in blood, hot on Ava Crowder’s trail. He thought and he thought and he didn’t sleep once in thirty-six hours, afraid that falling asleep somewhere beyond the hills would mean that Raylan wouldn’t be waiting when Boyd closed his eyes.

Of course, Raylan _was_ waiting. He always had, waiting on Boyd to find him after Raylan pulled away to swing and Boyd let him go. Waiting every time but the last, Raylan’s hand broken and three men dead in a mine and Boyd planning, that was all, never once thought he’d lift up his head to look and find Raylan Givens gone.

“Thought you’d never make it back to these parts,” Raylan complained, trying to look like he hadn’t jumped a mile when Boyd had appeared, leaning over nothing and trying to coax the shadows to _breathe for Daddy, can’t you just breathe?_

Boyd stared hard at Raylan. Every time Boyd’s mind had conjured Raylan up before, he’d been nineteen and dizzy over Boyd Crowder, for no good reason that Boyd could ever tell. Even after Raylan came back to Harlan, thirty-nine and harder and softer and meaner and kinder than Boyd could ever have guessed, and Boyd started dreaming Raylan in court rooms and across kitchen tables talking like a grown man, Raylan had never looked anything but nineteen.

“What did you see?” Boyd asked, though he let Raylan pull him into a somewhat shaky kiss, Raylan’s mouth a little dry. “What did you see, before I came?”

“Shouldn’t you know?” Raylan retorted, gaze cut to the right and away from Boyd, fingers cold against Boyd’s overheated skin. It was always too hot, in these dreams. “You’re always saying I ought to.”

“Regale me,” Boyd whispered, kissed Raylan’s eyelids when he closed his eyes, kissed beneath them where Boyd had never once seen any tears.

“It’s Willa,” Raylan confessed, angled his shoulders down in something more defeated than a shrug. “Sometimes she just stares. I think she’s listing up all my faults, the way a kid does for their daddy, to have them ready when they hit puberty. Sometimes she whines, a little.” Raylan paused. Breathed into the cloud of Boyd’s hair. “Sometimes she don’t,” he murmured, near silent, but Boyd heard. Heard, and gripped tighter to every part of Raylan that he could hold. Boyd might wake up, again, but damned if he was ever letting go.

“It ain’t real, Raylan,” he swore, and Raylan replied with a brittle, deadwood laugh.

“’Course it ain’t,” he agreed. “Just like Winona ain’t, and Mama ain’t, and Helen and Art and Arlo ain’t. You ain’t real either,” he told Boyd, pulling back to meet Boyd’s gaze in the inky darkness of the room. “But that don’t mean much, when I can feel you breathe.”

“I’m right here,” Boyd promised, the only offering he could make, folded against Raylan and breathing the air out of Raylan’s mouth, his hands over Raylan’s chest where it had never had the chance to scar. “I’m right here.”

 

“I think this might be hell,” Boyd said later, because the sheets itched and the bedspread itched and all the bourbon was cheap and Raylan was seeing visions of his ex-wife and his daughter dead and Boyd expected that if Raylan had gone to heaven, well, Boyd never would have managed to pay the visitors’ fee.

Not that it would have stopped him. Boyd would have clawed his way up from hell with nothing but a pickaxe and a stick of hellfire, would have busted open heaven’s doors the way he’d blown out seams, charged the angelic army and come out of it gripping Raylan’s hand.

“On account of the sheets?” Raylan wondered, cocking his eyebrow and looking far too comfortable in the uncomfortable bed. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“ _Raylan_ ,” Boyd hissed, exasperated. “I think it might be hell because you keep seeing visions of your daughter dead and because I know for a fact _you’re_ dead and could you try to be just a little complacent because we don’t know how long I’ve got before I wake up.”

“I don’t know,” Raylan replied. “You get to the point awful quick, in this place. You sure it ain’t heaven instead?”

And Boyd didn’t have time to clasp Raylan’s words to him, didn’t have time to think that Raylan anticipated seeing Boyd no matter where he wound up—but oh, he’d think back on them later, awake and into California and Raylan whispering sweetly underneath him, above him, _you sure it ain’t heaven instead?_

“What I don’t understand,” Boyd continued, ignoring Raylan for the time being, “is what you of all people, Raylan Givens, would be doing in hell?”

It didn’t make any sense. Raylan had always been the best man Boyd knew. Raylan stood for what was good, and what was right—stood for all that despite the daddy that raised him up and beat him down, despite the mama that never took him with her when she ran, despite loving Boyd. Raylan was the yardstick Boyd never measured his own life by, because he didn’t need to look to see the lack.

“I know,” Raylan answered lowly, staring at the motel table, though there was nobody sitting in the chairs. He opened his mouth to say more, but nothing came out, and his hand on Boyd’s back dropped clear through to rest on the bed.

“ _No_!” Boyd shouted, at no one and everyone, closed his eyes and tried to will himself to keep sleeping. It didn’t work, of course. When he opened his eyes he was alone in California, the scar on his chest the only surety that Raylan Givens had ever existed.

Boyd drove to the nearest corner store and bought out their supply of sleep aids, rested his hand on the butt of his gun when the cashier thought to protest.

 

Boyd didn’t stick around to hear the laundry list of Raylan’s sins, but that wasn’t a surprise. Boyd never had much liked lingering to hear Raylan talk shit about himself. “If I wanted to hear that, I’d spend my time with your daddy,” he’d always complain, throwing Raylan’s spare baseball glove at Raylan’s head. “Now are you going to force me to keep throwing balls at you, or can we go shoot something instead?”

Rayan knew his sins, though, could number them from one to a million, from Winona to Willa to Ava to Art. They came to visit him, after all, Tim drinking in a corner, finishing a bottle of tequila without saying a word, because Raylan had never bothered to find out just what was wrong. Rachel cleaning her gun, pretending it didn’t matter that Raylan was the one who’d gotten her promotion to Chief stolen away. Vasquez, whose career Raylan had apparently destroyed, if the man could be believed, though he’d always thought Raylan was dirty, so Raylan didn’t set too much store by his words.

Though maybe Raylan was dirty, in bed with Boyd Crowder now and wishing they could have been doing that the whole goddamn time.

Maybe he was in hell for thinking that his Aunt Helen had had the right of it, that of all his wrongs the one Raylan regretted most was never doing right by Boyd. Maybe he was in hell for not loving his daughter enough to shoot Boyd dead, when even he knew that it was the only way for Raylan to escape Harlan, Boyd Crowder the one thing that would always hold him there.

 

“You have to let them go,” Boyd said, the next time he came around, stubble on his gaunt cheeks and fire in his pitch black eyes. “You were a good man, Raylan Givens. You got to know that.”

“A good man?” Raylan replied, staring at the spot where Willa’s crib would be, rubbing his thumb over the scar he’d left on Boyd’s heart. “And how would you know, Boyd Crowder? You ain’t never wanted to be anything but an outlaw.” Boyd opened his mouth, the protest clear on his lips, and Raylan couldn’t help his grin. “Don’t you gainsay me, son,” he warned. “I’ve known you since before you was weaned, little scrap of a thing no doubt trying to shoot his way out of the womb.”

Boyd had been born the day before Raylan, the birth certificates said, but that wasn’t quite the truth. Boyd had been born at just before midnight on a Tuesday, and Raylan not fifteen minutes afterward. _I’ve known you from the first_ , Boyd would always say, two babies in the Harlan General Hospital, breathing side by side in their plastic cribs, wide, rooting, blind blue eyes meeting in the ways that babies’ do, never let Raylan forget that it had been Boyd doing the waiting, that first time, swatted and swaddled and weighed and waiting on Raylan to be born.

“Maybe so,” Boyd admitted, tucking his face into Raylan’s neck like the sweet child he’d never been. “But I’ve known you from the first, Raylan. You think I wouldn’t know what good is, knowing you like I do?”

Raylan turned his face away, uncomfortable with Boyd’s words. “None of the other figments of my imagination are trying to talk me out of hell,” he muttered. “Couldn’t you just go on about how I done you wrong?

“Besides,” he continued, over Boyd’s protest that Raylan hadn’t done anybody wrong, because they both knew that wasn’t true, “what good will forgiving myself do? Ain’t nobody ever gotten out of hell before.”

 _Ain’t like I’d ever find you in heaven_ , he didn’t say, but Boyd hauled himself up to loom over him and Raylan suspected he might have seen it in Raylan’s eyes.

“I’ve been thinking,” Boyd said, and Raylan groaned, and Boyd went on, unperturbed. “That maybe this ain’t hell, after all. I mean, there ain’t any demons torturing you, or any lakes of fire, or anyone pulling out your teeth with pliers.”

“I don’t think that last part’s in the Bible,” Raylan pointed out, to no avail.

“So maybe it’s more like … purgatory,” Boyd decided, though he didn’t look too sure about it.

Raylan snorted. “What are we, Catholic?” he asked, laughing at the awkward look on Boyd’s preaching face. “You don’t even believe in God anymore, Boyd, what are you doing, talking about purgatory?”

“Humor me, Raylan,” Boyd pleaded, and they both saw his stained fingernails start to disappear.

“All right,” Raylan agreed hurriedly. “But only if you stop doing whatever it is you’re doing, Boyd, that’s putting fresh blood on your hands.”

“That ain’t –” Boyd started, but didn’t have a chance to finish before he vanished.

 _That ain’t fair_ , Raylan knew he’d say, but Raylan figured it was more than fair. If Boyd was asking Raylan to give up his ghosts, Boyd had better give something up in return.

“You never loved me, did you?” Winona sobbed, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the mussed sheets where Boyd had been. “You never really loved me at all.”

 _I did_ , Raylan wanted to say, but he’d said it before and Winona hadn’t heard, could barely force the words over his guilt that he’d chosen Harlan over Winona. Over Willa. That he would choose Harlan again, as long as Harlan meant Boyd.

_You think I wouldn’t know what good is, knowing you like I do?_

“I loved you as well as I could,” Raylan told Winona, meaning every word of it. He’d let her go, though. Twice. He’d let her go, and she hadn’t held on, and Raylan’s hand had ached with an old pain that never quite healed. “I loved you more than I’ve loved any woman, and I loved you the best way I knew how.”

He said it out loud, and he watched as Winona’s crying quieted. He watched as she faded away.

 

They vanquished Raylan’s ghosts slowly, day by day. Boyd gave up whatever it was he’d been doing—Raylan didn’t ask, and Boyd didn’t say—and instead went hunting for scraps of information on the folks left alive in Raylan’s office, went to Miami and watched Raylan’s daughter sleep. Went to sleep himself and nearly cried telling Raylan about it, about how pink she was, about how blond her hair was growing in, about how her heart was fine (he’d learned, breaking into the house and going through Winona’s email when the women weren’t there,) and her eyes were brown and how deeply she breathed.

Boyd told Raylan that Ava had gotten away, that she was building a good life, a quiet life far from Harlan, out in wine country, that she’d run far enough to become her own woman, to be safe from everything she’d left behind.

He gripped Raylan’s hand, when he said it, and Raylan never asked about the furtive look in Boyd’s eyes. There was no more blood under Boyd’s nails, and that was all Raylan had asked.

They sent Willa’s ghost away, and Ava’s, and Winona’s, and Art’s. Boyd woke up and turned himself in with the stipulation that he be allowed to talk to Deputies Gutterson and Brooks, and the flabbergasted marshals service agreed.

“Tim’s fine,” Boyd promised Raylan, after swallowing all the Nyquil Tim would give him. “Rachel, too. She’ll be Chief again in no more than a year, I’ll bet. They’re already telling stories about how she managed to bring me in.”

“ _I_ brought you in,” Raylan grumbled, and Boyd kissed him.

“How is he?” Tim had wondered, because Raylan had told Boyd about Tim’s fascination with children’s stories and magic and asked Boyd what Mordor was, and so Boyd had confessed his sins to Rachel Brooks and Art Mullen, but when Lt. Tim Gutterson had asked what Boyd was really doing there, Boyd had told him the truth. “What’s it like?”

“Purgatory is a shitty motel room with no lights,” Boyd had said, and Tim had laughed and rubbed his eyes.

“Probably better than a shitty motel room _with_ lights,” Tim had retorted, and Boyd had grinned.

“He’s all right,” Boyd had answered, finally, hands folded together and clasped tight so that Gutterson couldn’t see them shake. “He says you could write a story about this,” he added, “about a felonious, atheist preacher who dreamwalks ghosts.” He looked away then, because he recognized the tenor of Tim’s laughter, and if Boyd looked away he could pretend he hadn’t seen the man cry.

Boyd brought news and Raylan talked to shade after shade, vanquished his daddy and his mama and his aunt, told them all how hard he’d tried to love them, apologized for running without ever looking back. Told his daddy to go to hell and stay there, this time, and laughed, delighted, as Arlo faded away.

One by one, they defeated all of Raylan’s ghosts. All but one.

“Who’s left?” Boyd wondered, eyes blown wide with the opiates he’d scored off a repentant sinner in prison, naked and pliant under Raylan’s hands.

Raylan wrapped his hand around Boyd’s, held on tight enough to bruise. Tight enough to shatter bone.

“You,” he whispered, staring at the place where his fingers dug into Boyd’s hand.

“What?” Boyd scowled. “Don’t be ludicrous, Raylan. I’m not a ghost.” He chewed on the inside of his mouth, and Raylan kissed Boyd’s cheek, reveled in the feel of his stubble under Raylan’s lips.

“You’re the only one still here,” Raylan said gently, sat up so that he could run his free hand through Boyd’s sweaty hair. “You’re the only one I ain’t told.”

Boyd gripped Raylan’s hand tighter than he had in the mines, two boys holding on to each other and running for their life. “Don’t,” he commanded. “Raylan, don’t you dare. You can’t send me away, Raylan. You can’t.”

“I’ve loved you from the first, Boyd Crowder,” Raylan promised, didn’t flinch at Boyd’s punishing grip on his hand. “I’ve loved you best of all.”

“You ran,” Boyd hissed, sounding like the rest of Raylan’s ghosts. “You _ran_.”

“I never let you go,” Raylan answered, and Boyd let out a cry like he had the first time he’d arrived, tears cutting fresh paths down his cheeks. “I never could.

“But you’ve got to,” he continued, setting his teeth and squinting his eyes and speaking over Boyd’s tears, thinking about the way Boyd had come to him the last few times, jittery from the drugs, his dark eyes too wide. “Boyd, you’ve got to let me go.”

“ _No_!” Boyd howled, or would have, if the word had made it past his lips, his mouth fading around his protesting scream.

“You’ve got to,” Raylan insisted, bending to kiss the space where Boyd’s cheek was thinning into air, Boyd’s grip a twenty-year-old ache in Raylan’s broken hand. “You’ve got to live your life, Boyd.”

Boyd slipped out of Raylan’s grasp like a summer breeze, like dandelion seeds adrift in mountain air, two boys plucking them up and wishing for impossible dreams.

“I love you,” Raylan whispered, to where Boyd had been, Boyd gone and the room that had been Raylan’s hell melting from view. “More than I love anybody, and the best way I know how.” Then he faded away, too, nothing left but the darkness and the faint stale smell of a cheap motel room.

 

_Twenty Years Later_

Boyd opened his eyes expecting to see Ava, or his daddy, or Bowman or Johnny or Devil or Dewey or Bobby Lee or Arlo or any one of the hundreds of folks he’d done wrong, half expected to find himself sleeping on a squeaky motel bed with itchy sheets, had spent twenty years dreaming the room and never once finding Raylan.

Raylan, who stood there full grown, his arms crossed and his hat cocked and a smile on his insufferable face.

Raylan, who should have been in heaven, and not in the same Gehenna as Boyd.

“What are you doing here?” Boyd croaked, disbelieving, and Raylan laughed, a sound Boyd couldn’t believe he’d managed to forget.

“I told you,” Raylan said, sighing mightily, stretching out a hand to haul Boyd to his feet, keeping the hand wrapped around Boyd’s even after Boyd was standing on his own.

“You told me to let you go,” Boyd growled, but he let Raylan kiss him, rubbed his free hand over the place on Raylan’s chest with no scar. “Not that I _did_.” He’d held onto Raylan for twenty years, kept the picture Tim had given him folded into his Bible, kept Raylan’s absent hand in his.

“Oh, I know that,” Raylan chuckled. “Though I should have known you wouldn’t heed sense. But that ain’t what I meant.”

“I love you, too,” Boyd said, answering a proclamation two decades gone, saying the words he’d been dying to say for twenty years. “I love you more than anything, Raylan Givens, and I ain’t letting God or His angels or any damned thing take you away.”

Raylan smiled, soft, looking for a moment like he was nineteen, the way he’d been for years in all Boyd’s dreams.

“Nobody’s gonna take me away, Boyd.” Raylan shook his head, shook the hand still holding Boyd’s. “I told you, didn’t I? I never let go of you. I never could. I never will.”

 _I’ve known you from the first_ , Boyd thought, looking into Raylan’s eyes, nineteen minutes old or nineteen years or thirty-nine or fifty-nine. _I’ve loved you best. I love you most of all_.

“All right,” Boyd agreed. He let Raylan kiss him and didn’t say anything about the tears on Raylan’s cheeks, because _I never will_ sounded like _forever_ , and forever sounded just about right. Raylan squeezed Boyd's hand tight, and Boyd held on.


End file.
